20140213

Your iPhone Can Now Alert You When A Drone Attacks

In 2012, an NYU graduate student named Josh Begley had designed a promising new app he hoped Apple might accept. It was called Drone+, and it aimed to alert users by SMS every time a drone strike killed people overseas. Over the course of the next two years, Apple rejected different versions of Drone+ (later "Drones+" and "Dronestream") no less than five times.

Begley had some trouble understanding why. The explanations he received seemed more arbitrary than technical, but Begley kept tweaking the app anyway. Then, last week, Apple finally accepted Begley's app. It's now called Metadata+, and will still send you drone strike push notifications--though, by official description, these fall under the general guise of "real-time updates on national security."...